The Plato's Stepchildren Gambit
by Ishie
Summary: Sheldon was whispering furiously before she'd even focused enough to see him. "I'm invoking paragraph seven of our recently revised friendship agreement!" When she continued to blink at him, he hissed, "The Plomeek provision!"


Originally for Porn Battle VII on livejournal and it totally got away from me. The prompts were: Sheldon/Penny, Star Trek, couch, reproduction. Set in the same universe as _Fascinating_. I don't really like the final exchange but I just got tired of trying to fix it. (Can you see why they don't let me write the advertising copy at work? :D? :D?)

Unbeta'd, so please let me know if you see any major problems!

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The knocking started just as Dream Keanu Reeves took the flute of champagne out of Dream Penny's hand and leaned down to kiss her on his penthouse balcony. With a groan, Real-life Penny dragged herself off the couch and yanked open the door.

Sheldon was whispering furiously before she'd even focused enough to see him. "I'm invoking paragraph seven of our recently revised friendship agreement!"

When she continued to blink at him, he hissed, "The Plomeek provision!"

Penny groaned. "Sweetie, you really need to stop encouraging these grad students."

He pursed his lips and shook his head, eyes wide and (she might have been imagining it) scared. "She called to tell me that she is parking her car and will be upstairs shortly. She's bringing _lasagna_."

"But it's Souplantation Thursday," she said, as if that were something everyone should know.

"Exactly!"

She waited for him to elaborate, maybe on whatever cuckoo plan he'd conjured up for the situation but hadn't bothered to share. Or how the hell he managed to keep attracting these nutballs. Instead, he kept darting furtive looks over his shoulder at the stairs, head and neck bobbing like a bird.

Penny snapped her fingers to get his attention directed back at her. "What do you need me to do?"

"I realize that this is an awkward position I'm putting you in, and I will understand if you decline, although I feel compelled to remind you that sub-paragraph four explicitly states that you will receive a minimum of three favors and one iTunes gift card in return for a successful deployment of the Plomeek provision. However, you did negotiate an escape clause for this particular section of our agreement. Therefore, you do still have the right to back out-"

"Sheldon, focus!"

"In the past four days, she has interrupted me in my office six separate times in order to 'casually' inquire as to the nature of your relationship with me."

God love him, he actually did the air quotes, one as he started the word and one after.

"Which leads me to believe that she is interested in more than a purely intellectual connection with me."

"Honey, no offense but I _really_ doubt that."

"There is an 85% or greater chance," he continued as if she hadn't spoken, "that if she sees the two of us in a compromising situation, she will discontinue her pursuit of me. Consequently, I will be able to return to my effective work habits in a relaxed and quiet environment without the constant interruption of frivolous banalities. Aside from yours and Leonard's, of course."

"Yeah, okay, whatever. So, what are we talking here? A kiss? A hug?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter. But she has proven remarkably resistant to most of my 'hints', as it were, so more extreme measures may be in order. Therefore, if you could make it look suitably passionate, as though you're so overcome by sexual arousal that you've thrown caution to the win-"

Behind him, Penny saw the top of the grad student's head as she turned the corner in the stairwell. She grabbed Sheldon by the shoulders and pulled him into a kiss mid-sentence. It wasn't the best impromptu performance she'd ever given, what with Sheldon bending awkwardly at the waist to accomodate her height with his hands still clasped behind his back. And the fact that she was, well, pretending to make out with _Sheldon_ (and holy crap it felt like forever since she'd touched him or anybody else, and it was kind of scary how fast she agreed to this) but judging by the gasping and choking noises coming from the direction of the stairs, it did the trick.

Or maybe not. There were no footsteps retreating down to the lobby and, thank God, there also weren't any shrieks of rage. She tilted her head to look past Sheldon for the girl, absently noting that his mouth was still slightly open under hers but his eyes were closed. She couldn't see anything but the curve of his ear and the ceiling above his apartment door. She tried shifting him out of the way a little without making it look obvious but he stood as still and unmoveable as a robot whose batteries had died.

Penny poked him in the ribs and used his flinch to turn them slightly. She grabbed the back of his head and raised up on her tiptoes so that his mouth fell on her neck and she had a clear view of the grad student whose name she couldn't remember. She appeared to be settling in to wait them out, checking to see if her eyes could actually shoot lasers, or perfecting her head-exploding powers.

"I take it that you've decided to go with a modified Plato's Stepchildren gambit," Sheldon mumbled into her neck. "That's rather ingenious. Has she gone?"

She ignored the completely involuntary and unwanted little shiver of awareness as his lips moved against her skin. Instead, she moved her hands down to clutch at the front of his shirt. He lifted his head and gave her a questioning look.

Penny shook her head and said in her best porn-star voice, "Oh, I don't _think_ so." She stumbled back through her doorway, yanking Sheldon along with her.

"Ow." Sheldon rubbed his chest when Penny let go to slam the door shut on the girl's rapidly reddening face. "You didn't have to pull quite so hard. I think you've removed three to seven percent of my chest hair."

She rolled her eyes at him. "I did not. Now, you can hang out in here until she leaves but remember to check before you open the door. I've got an audition in the morning and I don't want some crazed physics groupie attacking me in the middle of the night."

"I'm not certain that this display provided enough impetus for her to reevaluate her methodology." At her blank look, he added, "I don't think she's ever leaving."

"She has to leave sometime, Sheldon. For one thing, there's no bathroom in the hallway."

"Never underestimate the resourcefulness of graduate students," he said very seriously, his eyes bugging out a little more. Maybe she _wasn't_ imagining it - maybe he really was scared of this girl. What the hell did they teach people in grad school anyway?

"You look like a Muppet when you do that," she muttered as she stomped away.

"So I've been told." He said it very matter-of-factly, and she totally believed that he'd been told that many times over the years. It was almost enough to make her want to apologize, but then she'd have to explain why she was apologizing, which meant that she'd have to listen to twenty minutes of rambling about his ability to rise above mean-spirited comments, or the scientific impossibility of Kermit and Miss Piggy producing offspring if they were real. Either way it would be something totally bizarre and over her head.

While Sheldon made himself mildly comfortable in her armchair, Penny stomped around the apartment some more, because, _God_, Dream Penny's date with Dream Keanu Reeves was just starting to get interesting! And who were these grad students anyway to keep barrelling in on her turf? And then she stomped around because what the hell, her _turf_? Since when was Sheldon anything close to being hers? It had been more than a year since whatever that was in his bathroom and what was a little almost-sex between friends and neighbors anyway?

"Ugh, I almost hope I'm still dreaming," she said into the mirror through a mouth full of toothpaste.

Suddenly, there was Sheldon, looming over her shoulder in her tiny bathroom. She screamed and dropped her toothbrush in the sink with a clatter. He looked down, completely grossed-out, and asked where she kept her emergency toothbrush and UV lamp.

She ignored the question and ran the faucet for a second to rinse off the brush. "What are you doing in here?"

"Well, I'm certainly not congratulating you on your oral hygiene," he said, still looking in mild horror at where her toothbrush had fallen. "Something is blocking the light through your peephole, indicating that someone is listening at the door. So I fled."

Penny whirled around, nearly knocking him back into the towel rack. All of a sudden she was so pissed, so absolutely _fuming_, at his stalker that she didn't even crack a smile at his windmilling arms. Couldn't the girl take a hint? She stormed into the living room and was about to yank the door open when she remembered what Ramona had threatened when Penny had tried to get Sheldon to put down his dry-erase markers and help her defeat a mountain troll in the Level 63 quest. She still wasn't totally convinced that a human body could fit into such a confined space, but she certainly didn't want to try it or any other crazy scheme one of these unbalanced and _obviously_ desperate women came up with.

Instead, she grabbed an empty plate off the coffee table and fell backward against the door, hard.

"Oh my god, Sheldon, _yes_!" she yelled, and thumped the door with her elbow a few times. "Yes!"

The girl on the other side of the door cursed. That fast, Penny's rage subsided and she had to bite down hard on her lip to keep from laughing. She probably looked and sounded ridiculous, bumping her elbows and ass and the back of her head against the door while she moaned and groaned loud enough to wake even Mrs. Vartabedian. She turned, her hip bouncing off the door in a slightly off-kilter rhythm and looked through the peephole.

The girl had backed a few feet away from the door but was still scowling at it. Obviously, it was going to take something even more drastic to scare this one off.

Penny turned around again, speeding up the rhythm of her hip. Sheldon was hovering near the door to her room, hands clasped behind his back once again. "Get over here," she hissed, pointing the plate at the floor directly in front of her.

"I believe I'm experiencing a rather substantial paradigm shift," he said as he walked slowly and hesitantly toward her. His hands were now kind of clenched at his sides in what she'd come to recognize as his I Am Not At All Comfortable With This Situation, Captain stance. Which made a nice change from the I'm Surveying The Inferior Life On This Planet On This Away Mission version he'd been using in the hallway earlier. Although, he was pretty good at both. She'd only heard about his Spock outfit once (At a Renaissance fair? Seriously, who _did_ that?) but it wasn't hard to picture him in it at all.

Okay, she really needed to just say no to the next group Star Trek marathon, no matter how hot Sulu was without his shirt.

"Just follow my lead," she whispered when he was finally standing where she'd pointed. "And don't talk so loud. She'll hear you."

"I need more direction than that," he said in a weird, deep voice that sounded more like a Dalek with a broken speaker than someone whispering. (Seriously, maybe it was time she started picking her own shows instead of just watching whatever the guys were watching, no matter how hot the Ninth Doctor was when he yelled.)

"Good enough, I guess," she muttered and slapped the door behind her. "JUST LIKE THAT. OH MY GOD, _SHELDON_!"

She tossed the plate onto the ground, a little disappointed when it didn't smash into tiny little pieces like she'd hoped; nothing said mind-blowing, wall-banging sex like breaking a couple of dishes. It did, however, roll and sort of bounce into a stack of boxes she'd been meaning to take down for recycling, which wobbled and finally tipped over. The top box lurched into her entertainment center, knocking over half the empty DVD boxes piled there. As they cascaded onto the floor, Penny checked the peephole. She could just see the top of someone's head disappearing down the stairs, and a casserole dish abandoned in front of Leonard and Sheldon's door.

Penny did a little Snoopy dance on the spot. Oh yeah, all those hours of acting classes with the really creepy washed-up B-movie director were _definitely_ worth it!

"Mission accomplished!" she whooped and threw her arms in the air. Sheldon was still standing in the same spot, although she could see that he was struggling between a smile of relief and the urge to pick up everything she'd just knocked over. She bounded over to him and gave him a full-body hug, ignoring his customary flinch when she pressed against him. He brought his hands up to pat her on the back, and she smacked a big kiss on his cheek.

He stiffened, and in more ways than the normal someone-just-touched-me. Penny pulled back, trying to let him go without embarrassing either of them too much. Apparently he'd never bothered to learn to turn his pelvis like Raj. She was trying to come up with some not-too-awkward way of getting him out of the apartment when he spoke in that weird, broken Dalek-y rasp again.

"I believe this situation compels me to gather more data," he said.

Then he sort of lurched toward her, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

And then he was kissing her.

_Really_ kissing her. With tongue and nibbling on her bottom lip and she couldn't tell if her knees were buckling because she was running out of air or because... Okay, yeah, it was definitely the kissing because he pulled away long enough for her to suck down a few quick breaths, and she didn't feel any steadier.

"I need to revise several previous conclusions. It appears _Homo novus_ isn't without the occasional biological imperative for procreation after all," Sheldon said.

Just about the only thing Penny got from that was procreation and she wasn't even about to go there. Not while he was still pressed up against her like he didn't have a single personal space issue in the world, and she could barely think straight. "Wait, _homo_? Maybe you should go find Le-"

But then he was kissing her again, and this time she definitely couldn't blame the weak knees on lack of oxygen. He wrapped one big hand around the back of her neck and adjusted the angle of their heads so that she didn't have to crane her neck back as far. Penny just sort of dug her hands into his shoulders and held on for the ride.

There were things they didn't talk about. Ever. And at the very top of the list, written in huge red letters and underlined at least a dozen times, was having everything-but-actual-sex in his bathroom the first day they met. If it hadn't been for Leonard and Howard coming back from Kurt's without her tv or their pants, there was seriously no telling what would have happened.

Which was a big fat lie; she knew exactly what would have happened, and what would have kept happening for as long as they could get away with it. But she didn't think about it, she was pretty sure he didn't think about it, and if every once in a while it popped into her head while she was gearing up for a good long session of Ben & Jerry's therapy, well. She was certainly not going to tell anyone about that, either.

The door was cold against her back when she bumped into it for the second time that night. This time, Sheldon's hand on the back of her head kept her from hitting too hard. Her hands had been busy while she was thinking, or trying not to think, rucking up his shirts so she could get her hands on him. Her palms curved over his ribcage and she dipped her thumbs under the waistband of his pants. He groaned into her mouth and bucked his hips against her. She scraped her nails lightly against his skin and he did it again, then grabbed her waist and pulled her tighter against him. She felt like her whole body was vibrating.

"Penny," Sheldon whispered in her ear, with a little bit of a whine in his voice.

...except he was actually kissing down the side of her throat to her collarbone. And the vibrating wasn't her nerves trembling with some kind of arousal-induced mania; it was the door behind her as someone knocked.

As _Leonard_ knocked and called her name.

Sheldon pulled himself away from attempting to give her what felt like it would be a hell of a hickey by morning and gave her another of his bug-eyed, terrified Muppet looks.

Penny fought the urge to stamp her feet and scream. Instead, she said, "Leonard, honey, what is it?" in a relatively even and non-I'm-going-to-kill-you tone.

"I thought you'd want to know that the grad student is gone. You know, so you can get rid of Sheldon? I'm sure he's bothering you?"

She could practically see Leonard twisting his hands and scrunching up his face like he always did when she did anything that didn't fit with how he saw the world.

"It's fine, sweetie. He's going to help me with a raid. We'll talk to you later, okay?"

"Uh, okay?" He sounded confused and a little bit dejected, but she had more important things to worry about than stroking his ego.

Sheldon started to untangle himself from her and she had to grab at his shoulders again to keep him from getting too far away. "I thought you said you needed my help with a raid?"

"I lied." She pushed at him until he started moving backward and steered him around the end of the couch toward her room. "You're going to help me with something else."

He caught on pretty quick to her meaning when his calves bumped against the side of her bed. He sat and pulled her down beside him. "Will my helping you now take care of the favors I owe you for your assistance tonight? I assume you'll still want the iTunes giftcard regardless."

"Ask me again in the morning," she said and pulled her shirt up over her head.


End file.
